For 16 years now, we've asked smart people what they think will happen in the coming year in the world of journalism and digital media. And this year's collection of predictions, published last month, is the biggest - and, I think, the best - yet. (I may be uniquely qualified to make that judgment, as I am certainly the only human to have read all 1,881 predictions we've ever published.)
If trends continue, Google's ecosystem may evolve as follows: 1. Topic clusters go mainstream. To cut LLM-generated clutter, expensive features like topic clustering, once restricted to niche products like Google News (since the 2010s), will go mainstream across Search, Gemini, Discover, and YouTube. Discover's mid-2025 AI summary cards already signaled this shift. Here's how topic clusters look on YouTube. 2. On Discover, YouTube, and Gemini, traffic will go to fewer, deeper stories on a topic.
As AI takes over routine tasks, journalists will shift from producing stories to diagnosing what communities actually need. The core value of the newsroom becomes interpretation, clarity, and emotional intelligence - not volume. In an AI world, the differentiator is journalists who realize that the scent of the human is already one of the most precious gifts they can offer their readers.